


Five Times Gavin Recreates Ryan’s Facepaint (and one time Ryan helps)

by ryanthepowerbottomguy



Category: Rooster Teeth/Achievement Hunter RPF
Genre: Brief Violence, Fake AH Crew, GTA AU, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-21
Updated: 2015-03-21
Packaged: 2018-03-18 21:56:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,255
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3585456
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ryanthepowerbottomguy/pseuds/ryanthepowerbottomguy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The first time, it's a joke. By the end, it's a ritual.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Five Times Gavin Recreates Ryan’s Facepaint (and one time Ryan helps)

** one. **

The first time, it’s a joke, a prank all five of them play on Ryan. They have all seen Ryan’s face enough to know the general design, but they don’t have his practice or skill and it ends up being kind of a mess. It ends with black streaked in Jack’s hair, down Gavin’s throat, with red in Geoff’s mustache and on the bathroom sink, but they’re laughing as they settle down in the living room to wait for Ryan to get back from whatever job he’s working.

Ryan laughs, anyway, when he walks into the penthouse and sees them all with the facepaint, and really, that was the point all along.

—

**two.**

“Hey Gavin,” Ryan says, poking his head out of the bathroom. “Could you come here a minute?”

“Yeah, course,” Gavin says, pulling the bathroom door shut behind him. He grins at Ryan. “You need something?”

Ryan sighs. “Yeah.” He gestures to the makeup on the counter behind him, and Gavin frowns. Ryan had sprained his left wrist last week, and he isn’t supposed to be doing anything but letting it heal up.

“You’re not going anywhere,” Gavin says. “Gonna mess up your wrist worse if you do.”

Ryan winces but shakes his head. “I have a job. Arranged it weeks ago. I can’t back out now or it’ll fuck up my good reputation. Besides, I can still fight.”

“So what do you need me for?” Gavin asks, and in answer, Ryan hands him a brush and a pan of white. “You want me to do your makeup?”

“It’s not makeup,” Ryan grouses, “but yeah. I’m trying to do as little with my wrist as I can so it won’t give out on me when I need it.”

“ _If_ you need it,” Gavin says, but he goes to work, carefully brushing on Ryan’s paint. It’s a little hard to concentrate on the design, what with being so close to Ryan’s face and his  _eyes,_ but Gavin manages. He’s been managing, after all.

Gavin’s lines aren’t as clean as Ryan’s are, and there’s a wobbly spot on the jaw where Gavin got distracted, but it’s serviceable, and Ryan smiles when he inspects himself in the mirror.

—

**three.**

It becomes a ritual, after that. 

Ryan starts asking Gavin to help him with his facepaint even when he’s not injured, and Gavin agrees every damn time. He gets good at it with the practice, and the first time he does it flawlessly, Ryan looks like he wants to kiss Gavin. Which would just ruin all Gavin’s efforts, really, so he grins and backs away.

—

**four.**

They find Ryan, finally, after almost three days of not knowing, not knowing,  _not knowing_. They surround the warehouse the other gang in holed up in, and Gavin feels no remorse gunning down every single one he comes across. They  _took_ Ryan. Normally Gavin wouldn’t even be on the front lines for a job like this, but he had insisted, begged, and now even Michael looks a little worried at the pleasure Gavin is taking in killing these assholes.

The room they have him tied up in is near the center of the complex, and Gavin and Michael stumble across it first.

“We’ve got him,” Michael says into the radio, the message echoing in Gavin’s ear as he opens the unlocked door.

It’s dark in the room, and Gavin feels at the wall for a second before flipping on a switch. Ryan flinches as best he can at the sudden flood of light, but he smiles tiredly when he sees Gavin.

“Hey, Gav,” he mutters, voice cracking, and Gavin moves to untie him from the chair. Really, the whole setup is quite unimaginative, and Gavin is almost surprised that the isn’t a single bare bulb swinging from the ceiling.

“Can you walk?” Gavin asks, kneeling in front of Ryan to cut the ties holding his ankles to the leg of the chair. Ryan is banged up but doesn’t look too bad off. Ryan rubs at his newly-freed wrists. There’s blood on his face, and bruises, and black paint is still smudged around his eyes.

“Yeah, just lemme get my circulation going again,” Ryan says, flexing his bare feet. Gavin reaches up to gently touch Ryan’s face, frowning at the dark bruise along his cheekbone. He swipes his thumb through the mess of black paint under Ryan’s eye and drags it across Ryan’s jawline in an echo of his usual paint, and Ryan grins at the gesture and lets Michael haul him to his feet.

—

**five.**

And suddenly one day he’s gone. _Missing in action_ , that’s what Geoff calls it, but they all saw that goddamn explosion and he never met them at the safehouse. He’s fucking gone, and Gavin doesn’t know what to do with himself.

The others stay infuriatingly hopeful, and Jack especially keeps telling Gavin that Ryan’s just fine, that he’s pulled this kind of shit before, that he’s waiting for them in Los Santos and probably annoyed at their lack of faith in them. And Gavin knows all this, but he can’t help the hopeless grief crushing at his chest, because it had been his grenade, his goddamn fault, and he can’t breathe sometimes because of the knowledge that it’s his fault that Ryan is dead.

The night after, when everyone else in the safehouse is asleep, Gavin finds himself staring at his face in the bathroom mirror. The man looking back at him is exhausted, his features drawn, and there are heavy bags under his eyes and too much stubble on his jaw. Suddenly Gavin is _furious_ at himself, at the man in the reflection, and he takes a minute to shave before reaching for the pans of makeup that Ryan won’t ever use again.

His hands are shaking too hard to get the design right, and he gives up on the mouth entirely, but at the end he doesn’t recognize his own reflection and it helps, just a little.

—

**+one**

It’s another day, another heist, and Gavin finds himself in the bathroom, painting his face white again. They’re going to have masks on, but he’s started finding some amount of comfort in the facepaint. He thinks he understands, a little, why Ryan has always done it. The others think he’s started going mental, but he doesn’t care.

Ryan’s quiet when he comes into the bathroom, smiling a little. He’s known about it, known since he miraculously came back from the presumed dead (again, like a damn cat), but he’s never said anything about it. Now, he does.

“Here, let me,” Ryan says, gently taking the brush from Gavin’s hand before he can start with the black. “I have an idea.”

Gavin had just been copying Ryan’s paint, since it’s the only design he knows, but Ryan spends a moment staring at Gavin’s face before setting to work on a different design, based on Ryan’s own but also unique. When he’s done he steps back with a smile, bending to kiss Gavin’s throat—the only place he can touch without messing up his work.

Gavin takes a moment to stare at his reflection. There is more red in this design, no black except for what’s around his eyes, and there aren’t as many harsh, straight lines. It’s transformed his face into something strange, but he recognizes his own smile. 

He admires the paint for a minute more, eyes tracing the design so he’ll be able to recreate it, and then turns to help Ryan with his.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm [ryanthepowerbottomguy](http://ryanthepowerbottomguy.tumblr.com) over on tumblr! come say hi! (I also have a lot of tumblr-exclusive writing over there)


End file.
